Traveling with Infants: Parents Taking Newborns on International Trips

Mila has had a busy year of travel. She’s been to nine countries and taken 25 flights, with no plans of slowing down. It’s difficult sometimes to constantly be on the move. She can’t really travel light, and occasionally when she’s boarding a flight, she’s met with apprehensive stares by other passengers. But still, in the span of 12 months, she’s been to the beaches of the Dominican Republic, the Azores, the Bahamas, the French countryside, and the cities of Vietnam and Japan. She even got to celebrate her birthday in Mexico.

It was actually Mila’s first birthday she was celebrating, alongside her parents. Now, at just over a year old, she’s been to nine countries and has more stamps in her passport than 75% of Americans. “I know people say that the kid won’t remember, but those memories that we created, I would never, ever change that,” explains Sally Nguyen, Mila’s mom.

Nguyen is a travel content creator based in Boston—she was before she had Mila, and she hasn’t slowed down since Mila was born. She’s part of a growing number of parents who are crisscrossing the globe with their very fresh-to-the-world babies, logistics be damned.

Traditionally, the perception around traveling with young children, and especially babies, has been that it should only be done if absolutely necessary. It’s not just a lot of work for the parents, but bare feet and children under the age of four on airplanes are regarded with similar levels of disdain by much of the public. “I feel like there’s just a bad stigma when people see a child on a plane—they’re automatically like, ‘Oh my God, I hope this baby doesn’t cry.’ There’s so much negative energy within the travel space around babies,” Nguyen says. “I wanted to change that.”

Nguyen and her husband, Alan Pena, started the change at home. The family is based in Boston, and Mila was only six weeks old when the trio did a staycation at a hotel in the city. When Mila was three-and-a-half months old, they went to the Dominican Republic (Mila’s first international flight led her to a five-star resort in Punta Cana, where she was set up with her very own hotel crib). Next up was a month-and-a-half-long trip to France and Italy (picture Mila sitting on Florentine rooftops, picnicing in front of the Eiffel Tower, or smiling open-mouthed in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Eventually, they built up to a 28-hour flight for a trip to Vietnam and Japan (where baby Mila was pushed in her stroller through Tokyo’s oldest Buddhist temple, Sensō-jii, stayed in a traditional Japanese house in Kyoto, and napped during boat rides in Ho Chi Minh).

Still, even with all of these experiences documented as evidence of how great it can be to travel with a baby—or at least, how great it is to travel with Mila—Nguyen faced the skepticism of everyone from internet strangers to her own family. “My parents hear about how we’re going to travel, for example, when we took Mila to Europe—taking your kid on a trip just sounds so crazy to them,” Nguyen explains. “It was a planned pregnancy. We got pregnant, but one thing that was non-negotiable was [we didn’t want] to stop our travel, because travel is what we’re passionate about. Just because you have a kid doesn’t mean that you have to change your values and your passions.”

Nguyen was a travel advisor, content creator, and ran her travel blog well before she became pregnant. Even during her pregnancy, the couple traveled as far afield as Thailand. During the pregnancy, she and Pena also took trips to Iceland and Hawaii, filming content all the while. Before the baby, the couple took trips to Paris, Bora Bora, the Maldives, South Africa, Switzerland, Greece, and Las Vegas. A lot of that has been turned into material for Nguyen’s business—but she and her husband, who is a military veteran, started building their travel credentials long before Nguyen ever posted her first blog post. Case in point: At the age of 32, Nguyen has visited 41 countries.

Mila is already well on her way to surpassing that number. Nguyen and Pena are willing this to happen; Mila’s own Instagram bio reads “9/197 Countries.” The goal to visit every country can clearly be seen even when they’re just hanging around the house. In Mila’s nursery, the wall behind her crib features a detailed map of the world.

Leisure traveling with a newborn is picking up steam across the travel space. There are influencers, like Nguyen, who share packing tips, aspirational content, and ideas on how to plan the trips. Then there are the high-end hotels courting such visitors.

Boram Care in New York City is a postnatal retreat for new parents—and an all-inclusive vacation for 72-hour-olds. Boram and other facilities like it are designed for birthing parents immediately after birth, but can accommodate new parents up to six weeks postpartum—so even though going from a local hospital to Boram is the easiest, parents from further away from New York City can—and do—travel there as well.

Stays start at $1,050 per night, and include round-the-clock care for birthing parent and baby, including 24/7 lactation support, nutritious meals, and hands-on baby care education, which covers everything from how to change a diaper to how to perform infant CPR. A West Coast version of the postnatal retreat, Post Pamper, offers a similar range of services in San Diego. Outside of the U.S., these retreats are much more common. In Korea, for instance, it’s common for new mothers to stay in sanhujoriwon, or postnatal care centers, for up to three weeks.

Many of these services that cater specifically to new mothers are at price points outside the range of affordability for the average American family. After all, of 41 countries, the U.S. is the only one that doesn’t have any government-mandated time off for new parents, so even spending a few weeks away from work after bringing a child into the world is out of reach for many American parents. Checking into a hotel with round-the-clock care for both the birthing parent and the baby? That’s just unfathomable.

But that isn’t the only way to travel as a new parent, as Nguyen has shown. “I heard from other people that the first three months are your hardest three months, especially if this is your first child,” she explains. “I live in Boston, and she was born in February, so it was going to be cold, gloomy—for those following months too. For my own personal mental health and being a new mom where travel has always been my passion and my love, it was kind of killing me and making me a little bit depressed that we were going to have to wait.”

Even though Mila couldn’t fly in the first two months of life, Nguyen and Pena still managed to get out of the house. Again, they did a staycation in Boston when she was just a few weeks old, and when she was about eight weeks old, the family spent a weekend in Washington D.C., where Mila did the World Embassy Tour. “We attended the open house embassy event in D.C. where each embassy was open and serving traditional foods and drinks and some even had live performances,” Nguyen recalled. “We thought it was a cool first event to take Mila to before traveling abroad.”

Baby Mila isn’t the only infant racking up passport stamps and loyalty miles either. This is a cottage industry. On TikTok, Taylor Chamberlain Dilk, the cofounder of fitness brand Vitality, regularly shares the adventures she takes with her son Dallas. Each of her travel vlogs with Dallas rack up hundreds of thousands of views, and the comment sections are filled with other moms wanting to know the minutiae of how to travel with an infant. Daniella Fortier’s TikTok is similarly dedicated to her experiences as a new mother—including taking her infant son Wesley on more than 18 flights since his birth. Fortier shares everything from how to pack breast milk to a behind-the-scenes look at the intricacies of getting a passport for a newborn. (You’ll need to wait until the baby is born and they have their social security number before you can begin the application process, which requires many of the same steps as the adult passport process.)

For the actual logistics of taking a baby on the plane, Nguyen got pretty lucky. It’s almost as though Mila came into this world already knowing that her parents had an insatiable case of wanderlust. She never cries on planes—instead you can find dozens of photos of Mila sleeping extremely peacefully in her seat. Even when the family took their 28-hour journey from Boston to Vietnam, Mila was game. She was bundled up and appeared more blissed out than any adult could ever hope to look flying on an international flight in an economy seat.

There’s not even much tension on social media for Nguyen—the comments on Mila’s Instagram account are sweet and fawning. What’s not to love about a baby scrunching her nose in delight while looking out at Kyoto’s skyline? And on Nguyen’s Instagram, the most engagement she gets from strangers are questions from parents who want to travel with their own babies. Nguyen, like Fortier and Chamberlain Dilk, primarily responds to questions asking about what gear they need for carting a baby around—from travel strollers, to travel bottle storage racks, to travel cribs, to travel changing mats.

Not everything is positive, though. One person chastised “save people’s ears please” when it came to traveling with Mila. To this, Nguyen had two responses: One, Mila doesn’t cry on flights. And two, if you want to avoid babies when traveling, save up to fly private.

“It’s crazy to me how much people shame people to not travel with their kids,” Nguyen answered back. “The entitlement is unbelievable.”

Okay, so parents are traveling with their newborns—but stepping back from the financial and logistical feasibility of such plans, are they safe for the baby? Dr. Betsabe Petit Ortunez, a board-certified pediatrician at Pediatrix Primary + Urgent Care of Texas, definitely doesn’t advise air travel for babies under two months old. “I don’t see a benefit in traveling so early,” Petit Ortunez explains. “Newborns with immature immune systems are better off in a close, controlled environment for the first weeks of life, so unless it’s extremely necessary, I advise parents to be home.”

“Airplanes and crowded environments aren’t good for them. After the first vaccines and once the baby is gaining weight consistently, you can consider traveling,” Petit Ortunez continues.

Beyond still developing immune systems, newborns have other vulnerabilities as well that make air travel inadvisable for the first two months. Their skin is thinner, making them prone to dehydration, especially in dry plane air, and their ears can be more sensitive to changing pressures and to cabin noises.

To address these potential dangers, Nguyen has become a seasoned pro at making sure Mila is prepared for her flights (and again, she didn’t fly with her until Mila had crossed the three-months-old mark). Instead of the usual carry-on items, like extra underwear and a toothbrush, the packing list for someone who can’t walk to the bathroom is a bit different. Mila travels with her own noise-canceling headphones, Nguyen brings a portable breast pump (which she says is a pain to get through TSA), and she always has a binky or bottle on hand for Mila during takeoff, which can alleviate any pain caused by the rapid elevation.

All of that, though, still doesn’t necessarily assuage the comments you find on some of the baby travel videos on TikTok. Under one of Fortier’s videos, someone wrote: “Traveling with a baby is such an ick.” Search on Reddit or the news, and you’ll find thousands of echoed sentiments.

But what causes the ick? It’s not like babies are the only ones that have trouble controlling their bowels. And noise-canceling headphones can drown out the sounds of just about any unpleasant noises you hear on the airplane, from an infant’s wails to the snores of your adult seatmate. But as mothers know, or painfully learn—this hatred of babies in public spaces like planes and restaurants is more about them than the child. There is a cultural expectation that when women become mothers, they also become martyrs of their own comfort. A mother should no longer desire solace or pampering—she should bleed and suffer so that her child is a burden to no one else. New parents, especially new mothers, choosing to flout that expectation and find joy and exploration with their baby breaks these societal rules. Put even more simply: If a baby can’t tie a woman down to domesticity, what can?

Fortunately, this generation of new parents aren’t cowing to America’s culturally approved loathing of mothers. Baby Mila is a natural born jetsetter—by nature (it isn’t the average baby that can be “really easy” on a flight) and by nurture (her parents had to commit time, money, and an unfathomable amount of energy to make it to nine countries in less than a year, even without a baby in tow).

Mila spent her first birthday at the Nickelodeon Riviera Maya in Mexico, floating down lazy rivers, hanging out with SpongeBob, and snoozing just yards away from the Caribbean Sea. She wore baby-sized sunglasses and long-sleeved shirts to keep her skin from burning under the equatorial sun, while noshing on birthday cake and unlimited amounts of snacks at the all-inclusive resort. It was an unforgettable way to celebrate a birthday, though Mila is almost certainly not going to remember any of it. Not the smell of the sunscreen and chlorine mixing, or the sensation of standing between the larger than life statues of Chase and Rocky from Paw Patrol.

Sure, there are dozens of cute photos, and physical souvenirs like Mila’s Global Entry card, which features her unbelievably chubby cheeks, that will certainly be a worthy memento when she’s older, but if all she has are trinkets and images, is this travel really for the baby?

Nguyen certainly thinks so. She and her husband have set up an email account for Mila, and after every trip, they send this email address all of the photos, the itinerary of the trip, and how Mila responded to each location. It’s basically a digital time capsule.

“We’re going to give her the password when she turns 18, and I feel like at that moment, we’re probably going to sob, and I’m going to ugly cry because she can be like, ‘Wow, you took me here when I was that old? You took me there?’ And those are priceless moments you can’t recreate,” Nguyen says.

So maybe it’s fine that Mila is ignorant to all of it—the flights and hotels, the beaches and monuments—as with time, the memories of traversing the world with her parents will start to take root. Besides, until then, her parents don’t have to sit around waiting for her to start remembering. Instead, they’ll spend that time exploring.

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